Stonehenge 181
Image by jimit
Stonehenge

Stone shifting 5

I’ve been chasing up some Neolithic rope. From what I’ve found, most opinion is that in England at the time of the Stonehengineers they would have used rope made from the “bast” fibre under the bark of Lime (Linden) trees. (Perhaps someone could check that I’m right about that).
I had in mind several ideas:
To get just a bit to have on display, or use in a non-crucial bit of the exercise, OR if it was good enough and we could afford it, to get it tested and certified and then try to persuade the authorities to let us use it.
Anyway, I’ve finally found someone who is willing to help us. She is Norway’s only professional ropemaker and she is with a museum that supplies traditional and archaic ropes, mainly for historic sailing ships. http://www.museumsnett.no/hfs/eng/verft/reipslaging.html


I’ll send her long and interesting reply through on the stonehengineers email system.

Perhaps we could decide if we want to take this further, and if so how far. She seems like she’d be very pleased to be involved.

Sounds cool! I work near the docks, and theres a rope supplier nearby, so if you need the new stuff..

I think it's good to pursue these ideas. If we could get a small piece and perform some testing on it (and film ourselves doing it), or get your Scandinavian contact to provide authoritative documentation of her testing, then we can estimate the size of rope that would be needed for the job.

We don't actually have to use replica rope (big expense and big H&S problems), we only need to have demonstrated that Neolithic Man could have made rope that was equally well suited to the task.

If, for example, it turns out that Neolithic Man would have needed multiple ropes rather than one (to keep the thickness down) , then we can do that too, and just use the equivalent diameter of modern rope (which will, of course, be much stronger than required).

Rope used to lift the main tree trunk at Seahenge was honeysuckle (see Pryor) Don't know how this would cope with stone though. Compare weight of your stone with estimated weight of trunk when first installed or TT's replica?